29/04/2015

My first impression of Ziost upon landing was that it looked a bit like an Imperial Ord Mantell with snow, what with the town where you land being surrounded by rock formations. This was not a bad thing, as I always tend to think fondly of my newbie days on good old Ord Mantell.

Unfortunately my second impression was less positive, as Pet Tank and I ran into a wall, quite literally, when we tried to enter the first quest phase together, as it was another personal phase which we had to play through separately. I really don't like this trend. I don't mind treating the new generic storyline as the continuation of the class stories, but it's not a class story. Except for the ending of the Yavin storyline, which has some class-specific dialogue at the end, I've really seen no reason why all these phases couldn't allow groups to complete them together. Competing for the quest giver's attention via the group conversation system is one of the most fun things about levelling as a group - it sucks that this is slowly being eroded to the point where we are pretty much questing in parallel but separately instead of together a lot of the time. /endrant

Other than that, the quests on Ziost were pretty straightforward from a mechanical point of view. It was nice to see that even in such a relatively small story update, Bioware tried to mix things up with a bit of non-combat action, by having quests that required tasks like using scanners or Macrobinoculars. The quest with the super fast custom speeder in particular was good for a couple of laughs (I catapulted myself off the platform of course).

The only slight annoyance was the bonus mission to save civilians at the tower, which felt like a considerable bottleneck as there weren't that many of them around. It wasn't exactly a show-stopper, as you could just skip the bonus, but considering that every other quest, including this bonus one, gave an achievement, I don't think many people liked that idea. It might get better once more players are repeating the whole thing on alts and can skip the bonus without missing out on anything.

Achievements in general were a bit silly. Kill a mob - achievement! Complete a quest - achievement! Complete another quest - another achievement! I found it more amusing than annoying though.

The questing flow and environment felt a bit weird... unlike on other planets, you don't enter a single large area, but instead you do a couple of quests in a tiny area, then go back up to the space station to be sent to another tiny area, and so on and so forth. It feels very heavily instanced/lobby-like. As someone who quite likes a big open world I always feel like this kind of thing should bother me more, but I think SWTOR gets away with it (in my personal estimation) because it makes sense to have "cuts" when you're travelling between areas on different sides on a planet or between different planets altogether. It just feels a lot less jarring than running into a loading screen while crossing a zone border in a fantasy MMO.

Last but not least... the story! I liked it. While it was short enough to play through it in one evening, Bioware still managed to pack it with a couple of twists and turns. It ends without a real resolution, but it's been confirmed that this is intentional and that the "real" ending will be revealed on Star Wars Day (May the 4th). I don't mind waiting another week, though it does increase pressure on the ending to be something that was truly worth waiting for! On a side note, it's funny how many players thought that the quest ending where it did was a bug. I guess 3.0's major blunder with the buggy Revan fight has really hurt people's faith in Bioware's ability to put out content that works as intended.

On a final and completely random note: I loved the bit where you fight the two possessed Jedi in the tower and the Sage uses Force Barrier just before you can get him down. It was just like a bad PvP match and made me laugh out loud.

27/04/2015

After the grousing of the last two posts, let's look at some very random and silly things!

Here I was working on the Seeker Droid quest chain on Balmorra, when a dread-seeded Bormu of all things burst out of the ground. I was like... really? That thing was hiding under that small mound of earth? As if Bormus aren't ridiculous enough as they are.

(On a side note, it feels like every time I work on this quest, I'll either find the seed within my first three searches, or I'll spend ten minutes or more running in circles without finding anything. There seems to be no in-between. Has anyone else noticed this?)

In Terror from Beyond, if you take the speeder after killing the first boss but before you've cleared the trash leading to the second boss, it will drop you right in the middle of the first trash pull. (I don't know whoever thought that was a good idea... or maybe that someone just enjoys playing practical jokes on raiders.) I'm sure you can imagine this leading to all kinds of fun whenever people take the speeder at the wrong time. However, one time when this happened to me, the speeder dumped me in the middle of the trash mobs as expected - yet they just didn't aggro. I had fun striking poses while they ignored me.

Fun fact: while cut scenes filter out any players that aren't grouped with you, they don't filter out NPCs, so you can end up with funny shots like this one, which shows my Scoundrel having an important conversation while a crowd-controlled Sith is asleep while standing up right next to her.

If you're the cautious type like me, you may not know this, but like the Lich King in WoW's Icecrown Citadel, Revan in Temple of Sacrifice doesn't actually aggro until you start the fight by attacking him. This makes for some amusing screenshot opportunities.

24/04/2015

I'm mostly logging in for operations at the moment, and that's okay. What's not okay, or at least not great, is that ops have been nothing but a struggle for weeks and it's really starting to get people down. I blame the difficulty.

Now, before you tell me that I need to learn to play, let me explain a bit. For most of the time that I've been with my guild, I've thought of it as a hardmode guild. Just based on experience, hardmode operations are where we spend most of our time making smooth progress while still being challenged. Story modes are easy for us. Nightmare mode is the kind of content we'll stick our noses in once we've cleared hardmode, and while we'll manage to kill a couple of bosses, it takes us very long and I don't think we've ever finished a NiM operation before the next raid tier was released and allowed us to overgear the content.

I think it's okay to acknowledge these limitations. The vast majority of the player base has them. Unless you're in a small number of top guilds, you're always going to run up against a progression wall eventually where the difficulty of the content is increasingly too high to overcome for the combined skill level of you and your guildies. It's a normal part of engaging in this kind of endgame. It is however also a risk, because if people run into a wall for too long, they get frustrated and stop logging in.

As it turns out, Sparky was the easy part...

From Bioware's point of view, the trick is therefore to combine the inclusion of challenging content with giving people the ability to progress for as long as possible without hitting a wall. Tiered difficulty levels are a great way of achieving this, because it adds several different steps for people to climb and therefore stretches things out. Ideally, you then release a whole new operation before people have had time to get frustrated with whatever difficulty mode they can't beat.

Ravagers and Temple of Sacrifice have been very unforgiving in that regard. I've said from the start that I feel that their story modes are too harsh in parts and are likely to turn casual raiders off the whole thing before they even have a chance to get started. HealingSWTOR also asked back in February whether the operations are too hard and included the hardmodes in his question. Many experienced raiders have noted that the hardmodes for Ravagers and Temple of Sacrifice are more on par with the difficulty of nightmare mode in previous tiers. So when you have a (slightly too diffcult for what it's supposed to be) story mode, immediately followed by what's effectively a nightmare mode, where does that leave a hardmode guild? Not in a happy place.

For comparison, I've looked at what I posted about Dread Fortress and Palace back when they were current content - we had to put up with them for over a year after all. From what I can tell, it took my ops group a little less than six months to clear both operations on hardmode. That means that on average, we killed a new boss every two to three weeks. To me, that's pretty good in the sense that it's neither so fast that things feel too easy, nor so slow that frustration starts to build up. But then we moved on to nightmare, and things started to slow down. Nefra was comparatively easy, but Draxus took us something like two months to get down, and even as we managed to tick off a couple more boss kills, we couldn't always get them down consistently, which made it all the harder to actually get any time on later bosses that we were supposed to progress on. In hindsight I'm pretty amazed that we managed to keep ourselves busy with nightmare modes for more than half a year under those circumstances, without going completely bonkers or having people rage-quit en masse. That level of difficulty just isn't our forte and we simply spent way too much time wiping and not achieving anything for it to be a lot of fun.

And now? Well, we cleared the story modes in the first week and got HM Sparky and Malaphar down quickly. That was back in December. For the last four months however we've been struggling with what comes after. We have got both Bulo and Sword Squadron down, however it's still incredibly hard to repeat those kills, to the point where we haven't really had a chance to really work on the third boss in either operation.

You can do it! Or can you?

This shouldn't be the state of things less than five months after the launch of two new operations. It really makes me miss hardmodes that are more tuned to our skill level. I don't begrudge the NiM raiders their fun, but at the moment I can't help but feel a little left out in terms of endgame content that suits my abilities. I really, really can't wait for the next operation, and I very much hope that Bioware will reconsider their tuning for that one.

21/04/2015

Patch 3.2 will bring us the outfit designer, and after people have had time to test it on the PTS for a while, most of the reactions I've seen seem to be positive overall. They may criticise certain limitations of the system, but I don't think I've seen anyone suggest that it's a bad idea as a whole. Me? Once again I seem to be going against popular opinion by not being particularly thrilled by the idea.

It's not that I don't see any advantages at all: there is definitely something to be said for making it easier to separate looks from stats. I remember when the Thermal Retention set first came out - I thought that my character would look great wearing that while riding her tauntaun around Hoth or Ilum! But would I want to wear it the rest of the time (especially on Tatooine...)? No. So I wasn't going to move all my mods into it, and wearing a full set of gear with no stats was pretty much out of the question as well, at least if I wanted to do anything but strike a quick pose for a screenshot.

Like this.

With the outfit designer, silly ideas like this - costumes that you may only want to wear temporarily - will be able to thrive, and my inner roleplayer definitely appreciates it.

There will also finally be a purpose to all those green, blue and purple non-moddable pieces of gear again that you find out in the world or get from crafting. They had become pretty worthless except to gear levelling characters or companions about whose looks you weren't too concerned.

But at the same time I can't fight the feeling of how utterly redundant this whole thing is. The whole point of moddable gear has always been that you'd be able to keep a certain look while upgrading your stats. This is why my Jedi and Sith characters still own the lightsabers they received early on during their class story. If we now have another system that allows you to separate your stats from your looks, is there really a point in having mods anymore (aside from the fact that the outfit designer currently doesn't work for weapons and companions)? I mean, I suppose that mods will continue to exist as long as Bioware continues to release high-level gear in the form of moddable pieces, but if Bioware decided to make all gear unmoddable with 3.3, I wouldn't think that anybody would mind very much except some min-maxers who couldn't pick and choose every single part of their gear anymore. In the meantime we'll be left with a system that will make gear management even more cluttered than it already is. I still remember being confused by the concept of mods when I was a new player myself; I can hardly imagine how confusing this new mish-mash of systems is going to be to newbies. This is not good game design.

Also, while I'm generally very annoyed by people who criticise parts of the game simply for not being what they hoped they were going to be, I'll allow myself a bit of hypocrisy in this case and express annoyance that a feature called "outfit designer" will not actually allow you to switch between different (statted) outfits. Now there's something that would have been genuinely useful! As someone who does both PvE and PvP, switching between my two gear sets is always a nuisance (especially with the implants and relics, since you have to drag them into exactly the right place), and the amount of blunders I've made while swapping gear sets is much too high to count by now. Making that easier would have been something I would have appreciated with no reservations.

17/04/2015

When I think about my most memorable moments in SWTOR, a lot of them are from my newbie days, which automatically disqualifies them from this series as I'm trying to use at least somewhat recent screenshots (no older than a year). Another large number involve operations boss kills... which are nice and all, but I didn't really want to fill this post with shots of achievement pop-ups, as I feel that those are kind of boring to look at. Therefore I made an effort to choose memorable moments for this post which didn't involve killing anything large but instead managed to be memorable in some other, smaller way.

First off, we do have something that involves achievements, though different ones: a screenshot of the scoreboard at the end of what was probably my best GSF match ever. Did I break any records with my number of kills and damage numbers? Hardly. But I'm not great at starfighting, and in this game the way I kept picking up buffs and blowing people out of the sky just felt magical. The fact that six or seven achievements popped up as soon as the match finished only worked to confirm my feeling that something amazing had just happened.

Up next, we have my Sage in the Senate Tower... I think I was in there to pick up the Dread Seed and Shroud quests at the time. On my way out I was suddenly enthralled by these two lowbies however, who seemed to be duelling for the sheer fun of swinging their lightsabers, without even looking like they were actually trying to kill each other (though if they were genuine newbies, it's also possible that they were still struggling to figure out how to play). Either way it was delightful to see them bounce around and visibly enjoy just being in this virtual world and doing silly things. It's something that us more jaded MMO veterans often miss I think.

Remember my story about "the other Shintar"? No, I never did work up the courage to suggest that name change to him. But I finally met him in person in a warzone! It's a shame that I was on my Sage at the time or it would have been an epic Shíntar vs. Shintar showdown. Even so I immediately felt the urge to hit my print screen button and capture that epic encounter for posterity.

Finally, we have my pet tank and me on Yavin 4, gazing up at the Lance Squadron Commander. Why was this memorable? Because this was the first time that we saw this guy alive... and it didn't happen until about a month after Shadow of Revan's launch. For some reason he was always dead when I came by! I have yet to actually take him down, while I've seen at least one guildie get the achievement for killing this world boss ten times already. I'm sure one day I'll get around to downing him as well... but because it took so long, it will feel all the sweeter.

Like the one for the Jedi consular, I enjoyed that the inquisitor class mission reminds you that your character is actually supposed to be quite a big deal, this time in form of Moff Pyron giving you a summary of all the things your various minions have supposedly been up to lately. It doesn't really drive the story forward, but it feels good.

This was also the first class mission I played through that actually featured a companion - you have to do it with Talos by your side. Some people might find that restrictive, but personally I enjoyed the fact that the Inquisitor got some actual companion interaction when most other classes didn't.

The actual core of the story was... weird. The Sith inquisitor is another class that actually introduces a new character, a Sith researcher whose services you "inherited", which works well enough... but the actual story about his research is flat out weird and not very credible. It would probably make for an interesting starting point if they ever continue the class stories from here, but as it stands it's not very convincing. Nonetheless I didn't mind too much because everything else about the mission was good fun.

Imperial Agent

The Imperial agent brings back not one but two beloved characters and lets you wallow in nostalgia by talking to them about things that matter. It's quite impressive how well the writers managed to invoke the spirit of the long and convoluted agent story, even as they were limited to working with content that only takes about ten minutes of active playtime to get through.

What I found most striking about the agent story was that technically, in terms of gameplay mechanics it follows the exact same pattern as the smuggler story (go click on three things around Raider's Cove, then kill a dude), but where the smuggler story fell completely flat for me, this one was a major success in my eyes. Clearly the "fluff" surrounding each mission matters.

Sith Warrior

The Sith warrior mission is the one that most closely ties in with the main Shadow of Revan storyline, and while I enjoyed it, it mostly left me feeling kind of sad for my Marauder. The whole current plot development about the Emperor effectively leaves the warrior severely displaced. By the end of your chapter three, you are completely defined by your role as "Emperor's Wrath" - but where does that leave you if the Emperor has proven himself to be insane and his remaining close servants are all members of a death cult?

Bounty Hunter

The bounty hunter story starts with an emotional punch in the gut - Crysta Markon, your former handler from the Great Hunt, is dead, and her daughter needs help with getting revenge and getting herself out of trouble. This fits with the bounty hunter's theme of "everyone you care about is going to die", but while this was a bit of a hit-and-miss affair for most of the main class story, this one really hit home for me. I guess it helped that I had completed the Forged Alliances arc only hours before, which meant that I had been getting letters from Crysta in the mail about what a good time she was having. In fact, due to the delayed nature of those messages, I received one of them after I had completed the mission that mentions her death, which was just all kinds of weird.

As an additional gut punch, the people responsible for Crysta's death and whom you're sent out to kill have been trashing your reputation as well: you're supposed to be an "Imperial pet" that has no bite in underworld circles anymore, and one of the gang leaders you kill sounds genuinely bewildered that you would even care about going after them.

Combine this with the fact that this is the other class story that actually features a companion (Mako), and this was possibly my favourite of the new Imperial class stories - somewhat to my surprise, since the bounty hunter in general did not impress me with its class story in the base game.

11/04/2015

I removed Torhead from the "SWTOR Resources" section of my sidebar today, because the site has officially ceased to exist. Rav wrote a thoughtful post on the subject matter a couple of weeks ago when the news was first announced, and I don't have much to add that I didn't already express in the comments there.

I liked Torhead and went through a phase of trying really hard to support it, but in the end it had already been apparent for quite a long time that the owners' hearts weren't really in it anymore, so the site's closure wasn't really much of a surprise at this point - though still sad. (Interestingly, all the old Torhead links now point directly at SWTOR's official website.)

I was all the more pleased when I found out that TORCommunity is currently running a Kickstarter to get a proper SWTOR item database running on its own website. The campaign currently has 10 days left to go and they've had to make new stretch goals because they kept meeting the old ones so quickly, so even if you don't want to donate anything, the project is already funded and everyone should get to enjoy the results of their work for free. I chipped in anyway, simply because I had a bit of money to spare and really want to support community work like this. Not to mention that I simply want a new database! Even when its updates slowed to a crawl, I still visited Torhead quite a lot simply because a database site is a damn handy thing to have in an MMO, whether you want to look up where a certain item comes from or need help with a quest.

Today I found out that there's apparently at least one other new database in the works: swtordata.com. It seems to be developed by the same guy who runs SWTOR Conquest, and unlike TORCommunity's work in progress, this one already has a shiny looking front page. At the same time the site doesn't seem to be very functional yet, as I couldn't find a list of pets on any of the drop-down menus, and all the item lists looked chaotic and unsorted. I guess we'll see who comes out ahead in the race to provide the community with new database functionality to attract visitors.

The guys at TORCommunity may not have a visual database to show yet, however they recently implemented item tooltips like Torhead used to have. After a lot of clumsy faffing about with Blogger I managed to integrate them into my blog, and my first test in my last post seems to work fine now (the first link under the third picture). My only gripe is that the tooltip takes several seconds to load after the rest of the page has already finished loading, which initially made me think that I hadn't copied the code properly, even though I had. Also, as far as I can tell the supposed ability to override old Torhead links doesn't actually work - or at least not with any of the links in the old posts I've looked at so far. But hey, it's still a work in progress.

I'm quite intrigued by the work of TORCommunity in general. One of its staffers was on TOROCast the other day and pointed out that the site has apparently existed since 2008 - but I hadn't ever heard of it until a couple of months ago. If you look at the site now, its visible archives only go back to December 2013... so you have to wonder what the site actually did during the five years before that. Whatever it was, they have clearly been trying to push their visibility lately in what seems to be an effort to compete with Dulfy. This competition has apparently been laced with quite a bit of drama, but as a fan looking in from the outside, I have to say it's nice to see multiple sites working on supporting the community and (hopefully) pushing each other to try harder.

The one thing that currently worries me a bit about TORCommunity is that they have so many grand plans, I'm a bit doubtful whether they'll actually be able to go through with them all. You just have to take a look at their Kickstarter page - they don't simply want to build an item database, but also a character builder, interactive maps, leaderboards and who knows what else. They also swallowed up TORParse, yet that part of the site has been languishing in a barely functional state for months. (I was super-stoked when it re-launched originally... then I uploaded my first log and it couldn't even show me my healing done, only my dps - which, as a healer, I found to be utterly pointless.)

Nonetheless this hasn't stopped me from contributing to the project, because I really want to see them succeed, and I'd never pledge more to a Kickstarter than I can afford to lose. And while everyone has to make their own decisions on whether they want to support TORCommunity's current development or not, I think it's definitely worth drawing attention to.

09/04/2015

The most important team I'm a part of these days is that consisting of my pet tank and me. It seems almost quaint to think back to the days when we had only just started levelling our first pair of characters together and were constantly bickering about the "right" way to level. (These days I have thoroughly accepted that his way is the way we do it... even if you'll note that I still don't agree that it's the "correct" way.)

It's not that we play together all the time (which we really don't), but we have five different pairs of characters that we only ever play together when we do play them, and another couple of characters that at least frequently team up to participate in endgame content together.

There is something to be said for having someone you can bug at any time if you need just one more person to press that button to access a datacron... or whatever else you need may suddenly need help with on a Saturday morning.

After over three years of blogging, I consider the SWTOR community outside of the game an important part of my team as well, though we rarely get to play together. The problem is that I have limited playtime these days and that I'm pretty much never short on things I want to do and people I want to do them with. So even though I'm happy to do things like join custom channels (/waves at The Red Eclipse's #SWTORFamily), in practice I'm just always busy doing something else already. I hope this doesn't create any hard feelings; it's just that I have different ways of interacting with different people.

Nonetheless chance encounters with other community members in game always excite me - like in this picture I just happened to run into Rav from Ravalation in a random Novare Coast, which filled me with an immediate urge to capture the moment in a screenshot.

Last but not least, where would I be without my guild? Here's a shot of people bouncing around happily after we had completed Terror from Beyond on nightmare for the first time and got to place the furniture item that drops off the last boss on our guild ship.

I recently caught myself thinking about how I don't talk very much about my guild anymore and whether that's a bad sign... but I think it's more that we've become one of those "aged" guilds, where everyone is sort of settled in their ways (even if people continuously bicker about things like how we should handle progression) and we see relatively few new faces or major changes most of the time. Also, since I let people drag me into accepting an officership (even if I'm officially only supposed to take care of website administration), it has become hard to just enjoy the carefree and fun side of being in a guild, when I know the amount of work that people have to put in behind the scenes sometimes.

05/04/2015

This is a question that has been on my mind at one time or another pretty much ever since I heard that Shadow of Revan was going to give you a separate option to complete its story line solo or in a group.

Specifically the problem was that the mission just wouldn't update for some people (including me), with no known workaround other than to try again the next week and see if it worked then. For me this was annoying in so far as I had chosen to experience the operations story path on one of my alts, and while I run ops pretty much every week, getting to do so on an alt is much rarer. I think it was finally on my fourth or fifth completion of Temple of Sacrifice on my Sage that I also received credit for "The Enemy Within" and was finally able to see the alternate ending.

So... was it worth it? Both on a personal level to see both "versions" of the ending and on a development level to even make two different endings? Honestly, I'm not sure.

First off it's worth mentioning that the actual ending is completely unaffected by your choice - the actual ending being the showdown with Revan on the Forgotten Terrace (the one that you can repeat as a weekly) and a solo mission, regardless of which path you choose.

So effectively the only thing that's different is one of the missions that lead up to this ending, which require you to either complete Temple of Sacrifice once or to do a round of dailies. In hindsight it honestly feels like much ado about nothing.

The operation is cool, but if you're the kind of person who enjoys running operations, you're going to do so with or without an extra quest to go there. Choosing the operations path also has the side effect that you're locked out of being able to do the dailies until you complete the ops mission, which was quite a nuisance, especially with the mission continuously bugging out and refusing to complete.

In the end there isn't even much of a difference in terms of NPC reaction. I was hoping that if I chose the operations path (which officially means "personally leading a small strike team into the Temple") the very least I would get would be a hearty pat on the back from Satele Shan. Instead you get pretty much the same cut scene as when you choose the daily version, with the voice-over coming down to: "Good job with stopping Revan, now look at our forces 'securing' the Temple after you've already done all the work". Pfft.

I think in the future I would advise Bioware not to bother with such a "dual path system" again. Even if you ignore all the bugs for a second, the solo/daily path was pretty much always going to be more convenient simply because it didn't halt all your progress until you could get an ops run together... and even if you like grouping up and running operations, you would be doing so with or without that mission, so that there's little reason not go for the more convenient solo path just to see the ending of the quest and to unlock access to the dailies.

If you tried both story paths on Yavin 4, how did it work out for you?

I thought that the way it was written made it very obvious that it was just a joke (more so than usual, anyway), which was a bit of a shame in my opinion... but then I also kind of enjoyed the sheer silliness of the whole Kai Zykken angle, which pretty much made up for any loss in how convincing it was.

Now, with April Fools Day out of the way, we can all look forward to 3.2 going live later this month, featuring a whole new planet to explore and the introduction of the much-anticipated new outfit designer. The latter is probably going to be one of those additions about which I disagree with the majority opinion, but I think I'll wait until I've actually seen it in action to compile my thoughts into a proper post about it.

Meanwhile I'm certainly not bored, despite of the unusual length of the recent patch cycle. I still have yet to complete the last of the new class stories on Rishi (the bounty hunter), and at my pet tank's insistence I've been investing a bit more time into playing warzones again. One day that Elite Warlord title will be mine!

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